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Jamie Johns is the CEO & Founder of Australian firm, Sky Accountants. He also co-founded Wize Mentoring, along with Ed Chan and Brenton Ward to provide business coaching and personal development services to accounting firm owners who want to elevate their practice. In this episode, Jamie and Stuart discuss Jamie’s entrepreneurial journey to accountancy and business coaching, the life-changing impact of good mentors, and how Wize Mentoring is shaping the next generation of accounting talent and leaders.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Sutart 00:00:05.710 [music] Hi. I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and co-founder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. [music] Today, I'm joined by Jamie Johns, the co-founder of Wize Mentoring and CEO and founder of Sky Accountants. Jamie co-founded Wize to mentor thousands of accounting and bookkeeping firms worldwide. Spread across six countries, Wize helps firm owners to scale, achieve better financial success, and build their perfect lifestyle. Jamie also has a team of 35 with Sky Accountants pushing on 4 million of turnover. The financial planning division, Sky Wealth and Sky Mortgage. Outside of work, Jamie is a pro runner, drummer, hiker, and philanthropist. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast the one and only Jamie Johns. Jamie Johns. Good morning, mate. Bit of a 7 o'clock podcast [food?] to get your day going.
Jamie 00:01:01.339 Morning, Stu. How are you?
Sutart 00:01:02.674 I'm well. Thanks, mate. I'm well. It's great to see you. You're looking really well.
Jamie 00:01:05.932 Yeah. I'm still going hard as I'm not getting any younger, but [laughter] someone said the other day I'm aging backwards, so I thought that was a compliment.
Sutart 00:01:13.796 Well, there you go. Getting around cold of Ballarat over winter. Well, you're still up that way, aren't you?
Jamie 00:01:21.644 Still in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Yeah. And it's about 700 meters above sea level here, so it's pretty cold at times for Australia, that is.
Sutart 00:01:32.429 Does get cold. 700, but okay. I've got to convert these days. What are you? 2,200 feet? All right. So it has been known to snow in Ballarat very occasionally, right?
Jamie 00:01:45.714 Yeah. Absolutely. It'll snow here every-- not every year, but sort of every two or three years, we'll get snow here for sure [laughter]. And at summertime, you'll get 44 degrees celsius, so.
Sutart 00:01:58.629 Yes. Yeah. No. That's up there, mate. That's a bit much. No. If it doesn't snow here every year, we're in trouble that we've really fucked the planet when it's not snowing where I live [laughter].
Jamie 00:02:09.183 That's right.
Sutart 00:02:09.870 We aim for a good-- oh, I don't know-- 40 or 50 inches every year is about where we want to be at least.
Jamie 00:02:16.585 Yeah. Where are you based now?
Sutart 00:02:18.614 In Incline Village, Lake Tahoe.
Jamie 00:02:20.663 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Sutart 00:02:21.476 And so we've got about-- when it gets as fucking cold as it does in Ballarat, you want to be near somewhere where you can go skiing--
Jamie 00:02:28.381 [Let's go skiing?].
Sutart 00:02:28.893 --not just dig some dirt and put a hill in the backyard, mate. So we got probably a dozen ski hills within an hour from here, and the closest is about four minutes if you get the green light.
Jamie 00:02:39.660 Wow. That's amazing. So which state's that in then? So help me out. You being an Aussie guy.
Sutart 00:02:44.669 We're in Nevada.
Jamie 00:02:45.821 Nevada.
Sutart 00:02:46.479 But I can see California from here, more or less.
Jamie 00:02:49.326 Oh, yeah.
Sutart 00:02:49.917 And the big difference is taxes [laughter].
Jamie 00:02:52.428 Really?
Sutart 00:02:52.959 So it's a lot-- yeah. It's like a 13% tax difference between here and a thousand meters that way.
Jamie 00:02:59.337 That's insane. I remember you telling me once, I reckon, that the taxes are so different in every state there.
Sutart 00:03:05.362 It is. And you guys have got employer-contributed-- or contributed payroll tax, right? New South Wales, Victoria?
Jamie 00:03:13.650 Payroll taxes. Definitely. Yeah.
Sutart 00:03:14.342 Yeah. But it would be like that, right? So the equivalent is Anthony gets his money and then-- who's your primary these days? Andrews?
Jamie 00:03:24.868 Danny [laughter].
Sutart 00:03:25.435 Then it's Chairman Dan. Chairman Dan gets his money, not only from the employer, but from the employee as well. Right? And so each state sets their own taxes that they raise off the employees, and each state chooses their tax base. Right? So California has got no choice, even though it's economy's-- well, everybody says this. We should do a fact-check. We don't have any producers on today. We should do a fact-check that says, "Is the GDP of California as big as Australia?" Take about 20 seconds to Google. But that's what everybody says, right? So California chooses its tax base out of the employee base, right, because that's where it's predominant revenue-- or that's where the predominant GDP is. Nevada chooses its tax base out of the casinos in Vegas [laughter].
Jamie 00:04:13.593 Oh, I see.
Sutart 00:04:14.629 So you can see the pressure during COVID to keep the casinos open. Otherwise, the whole state goes bankrupt, right, because it's got no revenue from the employee base.
Jamie 00:04:24.057 Employee base. Yeah. I see. So every state sort of looks at where they get their money from and have a bucket [they collect?]--
Sutart 00:04:30.245 Yeah. Exactly. So Florida, I don't think, has-- oh, God. I should fact-check this too. Somebody's going to fucking tweet at me and say, "You're wrong. You're wrong again." I found out that some people were listening the other day because I was wrong on the podcast [laughter].
Jamie 00:04:45.982 Oh.
Sutart 00:04:46.600 And I got told off [laughter].
Jamie 00:04:48.032 Oh, there you go. That just proves that we have got some listeners, mate.
Sutart 00:04:52.771 I know. It's not just my mum after all downloading it 8,000 times [laughter]. She got sick of clicking the button. But anyway, so there are some checks that we can do, but I'll come back to my misstatements later on. Hey, you guys have been flying along-- since we last spoke, you're a well-renowned guru, expert, and thought leader in the accounting world and looked up to and whose advice is taken globally through the Wize Mentoring program. Is all that true? That's what they tell me.
Jamie 00:05:28.999 I don't know. Let's ask the audience [laughter].
Sutart 00:05:32.297 You guys have been on a tear. Well, start at the start. How did you get into accounting? How did you end up here in the first place?
Jamie 00:05:38.520 Well, start at the start. Yeah. I grew up on a farm. It was pretty funny. It was pretty isolating. For a people person-- when you're born a people person, sitting on a tractor and going around the paddy, Stu, it's pretty weak, man [laughter]. But long story short, I wanted to be a landscape gardener, of all things.
Sutart 00:05:56.887 Right?
Jamie 00:05:57.487 Yeah. Very true. And I had one accounting teacher who influenced me. He said, "No, no. You should do business." This guy, the teacher, just loved business. And I think it was-- at the final day, the deadline to put down your results if you wanted to go to university-- what course did you want to do? And at the time, I had my heart set on a horticultural course, landscaping. And last minute, the teacher, he was Rex, knew it. I think everyone might have a teacher or someone who influenced--
Sutart 00:06:33.621 Yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:06:34.421 --[inaudible] role. And he said, "No. Do business." So as the dice rolls, I ended up doing commerce at Federation University, like they call it now here, and got into university and basically failed all the first year.
Sutart 00:06:49.486 Well done [laughter]. Where was this? Is this in Ballarat as well?
Jamie 00:06:53.961 This is in Ballarat.
Sutart 00:06:54.646 Yeah, yeah. So you drank Ballarat out of all of its beer in first-year college.
Jamie 00:06:58.317 Yeah.
Sutart 00:06:58.886 So there's a joke that's-- my mates won't listen to this anyway, so I can reuse it, but it's looks like, "First-year of college was the best three years of his life [laughter]."
Jamie 00:07:07.513 That's right. No. Absolutely. And so yeah, that's how I started to get into business and commerce and all the things that we do these days. And it's just simply the roll of a dice in a way.
Sutart 00:07:19.593 So it's all Rex's fault.
Jamie 00:07:21.004 It's all Rex's fault that [laughter]-- I still see Rex to this day all these years.
Sutart 00:07:25.367 Oh, yeah? Oh, cool.
Jamie 00:07:26.333 Yeah.
Sutart 00:07:27.131 He must be super proud.
Jamie 00:07:28.570 Yeah [laughter]. That's how I got into business and the rest is history.
Sutart 00:07:33.672 And then you got your shit together, you pulled yourself together, and passed your classes. And then what was your first job?
Jamie 00:07:42.810 First job. I couldn't get a job. So in Australia here, we had the recession we had to have [inaudible] Paul Keating.
Sutart 00:07:49.078 I do. I do. Paul Keating's famous words. Yeah.
Jamie 00:07:53.581 I couldn't really find a job. I wanted to go to Melbourne and ended up going back to my small home country town. And I got a job as, really, a bookkeeper in a small manufacturing company. A furniture company of all places. And it's a good little story there I'll tell you. So when I got the job at the furniture company, at the time, I had about four or five different programs just to do the monthly accounts. You had one program to do the payroll, you had another program to do the general ledger, and then you had another program to do accounts receivable and accounts payable. That was a nightmare [laughter].
Sutart 00:08:32.294 All desktop? All on floppy disk?
Jamie 00:08:34.788 Yeah. All desktop. Just the old storage disks and all that sort of thing. And one day, this guy floated in, and he had a box. And this little box, it was like green and yellow. And he brings it in, and he was a friend of my boss's or the directors. And he chucked it on his desk. Then the director picked it up and he threw it on my desk and he said, "Can you install this?" He said, "I don't know anything about it. Have a look at it." Right? And it turns out that program--
Sutart 00:09:03.073 I know what that's going to be. Yeah [laughter].
Jamie 00:09:06.000 It turns out it was MYOB.
Sutart 00:09:08.715 Yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:09:09.367 And we're talking 1995 [laughter]. MYOB.
Sutart 00:09:13.199 Sending our love to all the guys in MYOB. It hasn't changed that much since then anyway.
Jamie 00:09:17.101 No. Well, I ended up meeting the founders, believe it or not. The Australian founders of MYOB got-- I think I was-- I think in Western Victoria, there was two certified consultants at the time [laughter]. I was the second or third one.
Sutart 00:09:31.301 Well, there you go onto a lucrative consulting career with MYOB.
Jamie 00:09:35.926 That's it. Back in those days, no one really knew much about it. And yeah, Stu, what happened was I installed MYOB. I remember after about six months or eight months, I went back to my boss, and I ran out of work. So I literally ran it-- I'd get to every Wednesday, Thursday afternoon. And because MYOB was integrated those days-- and I can't remember now. It might have brought in Payroll later, but--
Sutart 00:10:01.103 Yeah. I think it was a bit later on or--
Jamie 00:10:03.802 Yeah.
Sutart 00:10:03.848 --late 1990s, I reckon, I had Payroll. Early 2000s.
Jamie 00:10:09.901 Just the fact that it was integrated with-- it would do a profit loss and a balance sheet. I just literally had nothing else to do. So my boss thought that was great. Then he said, "Well, can you--" and back in those days, MYOB sort of had a bill of materials. Very simple bill of materials and that type of thing. So they don't even like working with the production manager. And we started getting the payroll, the inventory in there. And so one year to the day, I ended up doing all of that, and then I quit that job. And my first boss, he said, "Look, just give us one year," because he knew that I wanted to go on and do public accounting. But I actually had another mentor at the time, a chap by the name of Peter Fitzgerald, and he said, "Look, Jamie, don't do years in private industry. Go and see what it's like on the client side-- on the other side."
Sutart 00:10:55.326 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:10:56.451 He knew Rex, the other mentor-- teacher that I had. They both knew one another. So I was always guided by people, I think, when I look back. And so I did a year in this job way out in the country of furniture. I just thought at the time, "This is the worst job in the world," Stuart. And then [inaudible], I ended up becoming an MYOB-certified consultant. There was probably four in Victoria. And then after that year, I went and worked in public practice. And from that day, I never looked back. Like, IT, computers. Staying ahead of the game, that was [inaudible]. Just staying ahead of the game. And when I left there and finally got to public practice-- because I had that MYOB experience-- and at the time in Australia, it was just on a roll. Everyone wanted it. And then, as you know, Stu, when GST came in--
Sutart 00:11:47.489 Oh, yeah.
Jamie 00:11:47.921 --everyone just wanted to computerize their books. That's all I literally did for two years straight-- was just really out on the road computerizing all different sorts of industries, clients, getting them off the old paper, and getting onto MYOB at the time with GST, because that was just a nightmare to--
Sutart 00:12:10.298 So GST was the 1st of July 2000. But then the lead up to the end of '99-- what was it called? It's because of the Y2K bug, right?
Jamie 00:12:20.575 That's right.
Sutart 00:12:20.837 It was a fucking boom for consultants in IT. And there's probably still blokes going around that are dining out on the hourly rate of COBOL programming in October, 1999 [laughter].
Jamie 00:12:36.115 It really brings back memories now. You're absolutely right. And we all thought the world was going to end and servers were going to tip over and--
Sutart 00:12:42.529 Yeah, yeah. There was no flights, remember?
Jamie 00:12:44.925 Yeah. It's just amazing. And every client was upgrading, upgrading. And if it didn't have the four-years digits in the [inaudible]--
Sutart 00:12:54.493 Yeah. That's right. You were Y2K compliant. Yeah. Oh, I remember [laughter].
Jamie 00:12:58.181 We had the tech bubble then, didn't we?
Sutart 00:12:59.597 We did. We did. We did. Absolutely, we did. See what I'm going to do here. You're ready? That contributed to the GDP of Australia, which is now-- see. Do you see that?
Jamie 00:13:11.501 Yeah.
Sutart 00:13:11.964 Do you like that [laughter]? So what do you reckon the GDP of Australia is these days?
Jamie 00:13:16.253 I wouldn't have a clue.
Sutart 00:13:17.866 Go on. Get any guess. Go. Give us a number.
Jamie 00:13:21.117 Maybe a trillion [inaudible].
Sutart 00:13:22.014 Yeah. 1.63 trillion. We hypothesize that California was sort of equivalent. Fucking Los Angeles is bigger than Australia, so there you go. That gives you a 1.67 trillion.
Jamie 00:13:35.612 That's amazing. Yeah.
Sutart 00:13:36.629 It gives you an idea of the place of Australia in the global economy, but.
Jamie 00:13:40.988 Yeah. We're along the blip [laughter].
Sutart 00:13:43.212 A little blip on the ass of Downtown Los Angeles, right?
Jamie 00:13:48.138 Yeah. Amazing. Amazing.
Sutart 00:13:49.619 I mean, that consulting boom continued for years beyond. The GST is sort of-- because there was a lot of people that weren't organized. You remember Xero started in 2006, so there's still five or six years of desktop accounting that was-- I remember even MYOB would fax you every year for your price upgrades.
Jamie 00:14:10.913 Yeah. And there was a lot of players in the game too. Back in those days, there was a company that [I annually?] ended up working for called CData, Solution 6, all the accounting companies. There has been a lot of mergers and acquisitions and-- remember the old days, there was-- do you remember TeleTax? We used to have TeleTax and I think--
Sutart 00:14:31.778 No. I wasn't in the tax-- I wasn't in accounting then, so--
Jamie 00:14:35.398 [No. Tax. Yeah?]. That got rolled into MYOB in the end as well. So there was a lot of software back in those days for accountants as well-- for their internal systems, so.
Sutart 00:14:46.960 That's right. APS. And as you said, Solution 6. HandiSoft.
Jamie 00:14:52.785 HandiSoft. Yeah. It's all come a long way. I remember back in the late 90s, I always loved computers. They saved me from [Uni Computers?], but I used to use a thing called pcAnywhere. I don't know if you ever remember--
Sutart 00:15:04.914 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Join me and all. What was your first computer then?
Jamie 00:15:10.382 My first computer was [Atari MEGA RAN, 1991 at uni?] that was just a absolute IBM clone [laughter].
Sutart 00:15:16.439 Oh, yeah. You had the IBM clone. You didn't even start with the Apple IIe.
Jamie 00:15:19.893 That, my father-in-law did. He had one of the first Apples in Australia actually.
Sutart 00:15:23.905 Yeah?
Jamie 00:15:24.454 Yeah. It was funny. [Erin?] and I used to try and get the Mac and the PC or the IBM cloners, they used to say, to talk to one another [though?].
Sutart 00:15:33.345 Fucking impossible [laughter].
Jamie 00:15:33.795 What we're doing now, we tried to test that for 10 years. We are always on different software and things and--
Sutart 00:15:40.638 I was talking about this with-- I don't know which order the podcast is going to come out, so this might sound strange. But there's another guy from [IRS?] of all places. We're reminiscing about the invention of IP and TCP/IP. I remember coding in C++. Like, actually sending bits in eight block bits from one machine to another, so you could see. And if I can-- either way, I won't get laid ever if I [started?] things-- if that's my college life, right? But did you ever go to PC meetups? Did you ever illegally swap games and all of that too?
Jamie 00:16:15.968 Yeah. Not really into the games and that type of thing, but I was always fascinated by remote stuff like trying to do what we do these days right now or on Zoom or whatever. And this is back in the late 90s. I was more into remote-- how could I remote into a client's computer and control it? And so this is even in the 90s, and it just comes so fast. It's [inaudible], but yeah.
Sutart 00:16:39.737 I mean, the difficulty way back then was the versioning through the 2,000s of MYOB and QuickBooks. You were only ever in one camp, right [laughter]?
Jamie 00:16:50.284 Yeah.
Sutart 00:16:52.565 You'd walk around town with 17 different versions of MYOB because you never know which one your client had.
Jamie 00:16:58.985 Yeah. Funny you're saying that. So in the late 90s too, when I finally got the job in public practice, you see, I obviously lived in this small country town. There wasn't that many people, but the local university, they had a job going after hours of teaching people out in these distant, small towns how to use Quicken or QuickBooks.
Sutart 00:17:22.183 Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:17:22.079 [crosstalk]. So anyway, I applied for this job. And it come with a car, and the money was great. [crosstalk] probably wanted to do it [laughter]. So I ended up getting the job. So I'd work my normal day job--
Sutart 00:17:37.228 Nice.
Jamie 00:17:37.639 --and then [you'd?] go home, back to the farm, have dinner, and then I jump and go to the local sort of university. It was just like a branch. And I'd grab the car. And in the boot, it was like 20 laptops, which are like [bricks?] [laughter] [crosstalk]--
Sutart 00:17:52.614 They were huge. Yeah.
Jamie 00:17:54.447 They were huge. And so I'd jump in this car, and I'd whip out the-- and go like 60K out to a small local hall, like a [crosstalk]--
Sutart 00:18:02.040 Yeah, yeah. Like a little commute-- like the local RSL or something [laughter]?
Jamie 00:18:05.406 Like [stuffs like that?]. Yeah. And then, so I'd open up the boot, and I'd get all these laptops out. And sure enough, all the local farmers would [rock?] out. And the small business people who ran the corner shop and the butcher and the baker--
Sutart 00:18:16.538 And the candlestick maker.
Jamie 00:18:18.796 That's it [laughter]. And then they will come. And so I did this for a couple of years. I'd just teach people Quicken. So--
Sutart 00:18:25.535 Fantastic.
Jamie 00:18:26.159 --[inaudible] totally had all the versions: Quicken, QuickBooks, MYOB. Because they'd choose what course they wanted through the university. I just had to deliver it. That was a really good experience in IT, bookkeeping, and implementation and helping people. So it's all experience [though?]. That's--
Sutart 00:18:43.670 Fantastic. And that all laid the stage for-- or laid the groundwork for everything that came later, of course. But when did you sort of start getting the idea of your own practice, and how did you sort of pick up your first client? And what was that journey like?
Jamie 00:18:59.826 Yeah. Look, I think if you start your own business, it's pretty much in your DNA. If I look back now and-- every generation that I look back, probably both on my parent's side, they all had their own business. They're all farmers. And way back, I think when you go to the great-great-great-- the first settlers had his own pub or the inn as they call it [crosstalk] [laughter].
Sutart 00:19:24.493 Inn. Yeah. The corner inn. Yeah.
Jamie 00:19:26.390 [inaudible]. So I think it's just in you to be self-directed and to have your own business if you like. And for me, that was-- I was about 30 at the time. I'd had quite a few jobs at this time, so I'd sort of done a bit of everything. As I said, I've worked in the furniture company, the private industry, and then I'd worked for some small public accounting firms. And then when I came to Ballarat, I actually ended up working for the largest firm in Ballarat at the time. I think it was maybe about 20 accountants, and the GST would come in. My role was to teach all the other accountants how to use the software with GST.
Sutart 00:20:05.266 Yeah. It was so important that everybody-- it was books with--
Jamie 00:20:07.922 Yeah. So--
Sutart 00:20:08.681 --digital, right? Yeah.
Jamie 00:20:10.204 So that's sort of, I suppose, training, and teaching and consulting type of thing rolled on. And then, sure enough, I wanted to start my own business. So I think I had one client that I'd just-- what actually happened was I wanted to build a brick fence at my house. It's a true story. So I rang a couple of people, and I finally got onto a bricklayer. And this guy's name was Pete Linane. And Pete turned up at my house and-- and this fence I wanted was massive [laughter]. So he said, "Look, you've got to have these foundations," all that sort of thing. So sure enough, being off the farm, my dad come down, and we actually dug the foundations by hand.
Sutart 00:20:51.302 Yeah, yeah. Pour them yourself. Yeah. Surely, you borrowed some bloke's back out and just fucking knocked it out [laughter]?
Jamie 00:20:57.593 We did it by hand, and the bricklayer turned up and he freaked out. He's going, "Oh, you guys are [crosstalk]--"
Sutart 00:21:01.901 Yeah. "You guys are fucking crazy [laughter]. This would have been a lot easier."
Jamie 00:21:06.410 Anyhow, so long story short, Pete turned up, and the bricklayer built this wall. But halfway through building the wall, he said to me, "Jamie," he said, "Look, I've had this dream about selling sunglasses." I said, "Oh, really?" Like, "From bricklaying to selling sunglasses? That's [crosstalk]."
Sutart 00:21:22.724 Right. Okay.
Jamie 00:21:23.761 And he said, "Yeah, yeah." He said, "I want to call it-- there's a [rack?] on the front, and a wrap at the back." I said, "Oh." I said, "What's the goal with the wrap on the back?" And he said, "Well, it's not--" he said, "It's a billboard." And I said, "Oh, that's pretty interesting." And he goes, "Yeah." And then sure enough, he gets on the phone, and long story short-- this guy can talk, yeah, right? He's a bricklayer.
Sutart 00:21:44.812 Yeah, yeah. Pete the bricklayer. Yeah.
Jamie 00:21:46.572 He's a bricklayer. And he ends up getting a deal with Bunnings, Australia-wide, to supply [laughter] every Bunning--
Sutart 00:21:53.804 To supply wrap-around glasses for bricklayers with a billboard on the back.
Jamie 00:21:58.142 Yeah. With the Bunnings--
Sutart 00:21:59.757 With the Bunnings-- the green Bunning strap. Bunnings is, I guess--
Jamie 00:22:04.318 Like Walmart [laughter].
Sutart 00:22:04.352 --Walmart. It's closest. Yeah [laughter].
Jamie 00:22:07.107 So sure enough--
Sutart 00:22:07.914 For this northern hemisphere. But both people are listening up here. Yeah.
Jamie 00:22:12.017 Yeah. So that was my first client. So what I used to go-- so what I used to do is really win-win. I'd give a lot. And so I'd go over Pete's place and have beers and we'd have pizza. And then while we did that, I'd set him up on MYOB and get his books working. And he's still a client 20 years later. And we're still best friends.
Sutart 00:22:33.346 Yeah. That's [nice?].
Jamie 00:22:33.671 And he was our very first client, the bricklayer, who did it big with Bunnings. And he went on to great things, Pete, but amazing, really. So that was my first client.
Sutart 00:22:42.887 Tell me what Pete's up to these days. Has he got an empire or what?
Jamie 00:22:45.962 He still has his business that virtually just sort of runs without [himself?] in a obscure warehouse. It doesn't even have the sign at the front. You wouldn't even know. And supplies sunglasses to all Bunnings all over Australia. Overseas as well. UK. Yeah. He spends, mostly, time in Bali and Cannes. He just does what he wants, really [laughter], so.
Sutart 00:23:06.882 Well, that's so Aussie. I love it.
Jamie 00:23:09.236 Yeah. He's from Ballarat, so he don't like the cold too much [laughter].
Sutart 00:23:11.399 Yeah. Now, fair enough. I get it.
Jamie 00:23:12.892 So yeah. And then I think his distribution-- so he imports from overseas and then distributes the UV Wraps and Straps - it's cool; you can look it up - and distributes all over Australia and overseas and everywhere.
Sutart 00:23:27.435 Yeah. [inaudible]. I love those stories for guys like you. And nearly every single one of our customers has a story about Pete the bricklayer. And the journey that Jamie and Pete have gone on to throughout their lives and helped each other and just experience that journey together is so special, and we love it. We just absolutely love-- how those moments come about are quite funny, but also, the impact in each other's lives is just fantastic [laughter].
Jamie 00:24:04.015 Yeah. You never know. I think you've got to be so open to the universe in that sense, so.
Sutart 00:24:08.769 Yeah.
Jamie 00:24:09.238 As soon as he had that idea, he was on the phone and-- now, he didn't know how to do his books and all that, so I said, "Oh, oh, I'll help you, mate," you know?
Sutart 00:24:17.645 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:24:18.337 "I'll help you."
Sutart 00:24:19.635 Do it over a few beers and away you go, right?
Jamie 00:24:22.934 And just to finish that story, Stu, it's like in Ballarat, everyone knew Peter.
Sutart 00:24:27.503 Yeah. Of course.
Jamie 00:24:27.875 He was just a talker. He was a bricklayer that just talked. And so I wasn't from Ballarat. Right? So once I started working with Pete, the people he [sent to me?] was unbelievable. He'd--
Sutart 00:24:40.022 That's it.
Jamie 00:24:40.419 --say, "No, no, go and see this guy," you know?
Sutart 00:24:42.672 Yeah.
Jamie 00:24:43.152 And that's how I [got?] business from people knowing the bricklayer.
Sutart 00:24:46.161 You still probably owe him commission.
Jamie 00:24:48.436 Probably [laughter].
Sutart 00:24:49.131 Your referrals.
Jamie 00:24:50.292 Yeah. I mean, he's just the typical guy that would, as he'd say, "Sell sand to the Arabs and snow to the Eskimos."
Sutart 00:24:55.815 That's it.
Jamie 00:24:55.820 He'd talk anyone into anything.
Sutart 00:24:58.382 Good on him.
Jamie 00:24:58.643 Yeah. So yeah.
Sutart 00:25:00.772 So my son who is four just can't get enough of bulldozers and front loaders and trucks and fire engines and everything. Right? And you'd be driving down the road, and you'd say, "Oh, look, Archie, look, look, look, it's a bulldozer." He said, "No, Daddy. That's a front loader." Because he's very specific about his construction machinery. Very specific. And then so earlier this year, we had the real privilege of staying overnight with the Australian Chamber of-- the San Francisco Australia Chamber of Commerce event at Skywalker Ranch, which is where George Lucas has--
Jamie 00:25:41.661 Wow.
Sutart 00:25:41.919 --built out his sort of hospitality area and all of this. It is. It's just phenomenal. We're really lucky. If you are building Skywalker Ranch, what would you put out the front of where the valley area is and where you greet everybody? Who would you put there in a statue? There's only one choice, right? There's only one choice. There's only one choice you could possibly put there. And it's not Luke, it's not Princess Leia [inaudible], of course, and it's not Chewy, and it's not Han Solo. So it's Yoda, obviously. And I say to Archie, "Well, we're going to go and see Yoda, buddy. You're going to get to see Yoda." And he goes, "Is it a front Yoda or a back Yoda, Daddy [laughter]?"
Jamie 00:26:22.840 He's thinking excavation [crosstalk].
Sutart 00:26:23.952 He's thinking excavation. Not Star Wars memorabilia.
Jamie 00:26:27.972 It's funny to say that. It reminds me of what Bill Gates said. Bill Gates said, "You should end up doing what you can't put down from the age of 10 to 20."
Sutart 00:26:37.317 Yeah. That's it.
Jamie 00:26:37.546 And it's funny. When I used to go with me dad on the farm and the truck to the [soil?] over the week, I'd be into books, Stu, on business and success and-- in the wheat truck and the old wheat truck. And me dad would be looking saying, "What are you reading that for [laughter]?"
Sutart 00:26:54.432 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah [laughter]. "Not going to help you up here, mate [laughter]."
Jamie 00:27:00.221 He'd be thinking, "Well, it's not going to help you drive the tractor."
Sutart 00:27:02.615 That's right. That's right.
Jamie 00:27:03.923 So it's something if he said so you--
Sutart 00:27:06.190 "This fucking hay is not going to shovel itself [laughter]."
Jamie 00:27:08.395 No. "While you're sitting there reading that book," right? So--
Sutart 00:27:10.790 That's right [laughter].
Jamie 00:27:12.400 But you know what Archie will end up doing then?
Sutart 00:27:14.436 Yeah, yeah. That's all right. Well, maybe he'll act or he'll be in a George Lucas movie, so that'll be right. But no, I think every four-year-old goes through their construction phase.
Jamie 00:27:26.313 Oh, definitely. Yeah. That's it.
Sutart 00:27:28.534 So you set up MYOB for Pete the bricklayer, and he's now GST compliant. He's sending his BAS returns to the government and paying his way. And you pick up a couple of more clients around Ballarat, and then all of a sudden, you've got 20 staff on your hands and working 100 hours a week, I bet.
Jamie 00:27:52.686 Yeah. Pretty much. Actually, before I actually leaked out on my own, I went and worked for the local hospital. So I did a one-year stint as the finance manager in the hospital at the time. And they have big budgets. I think it was 20 million turnover, and I think that's probably 80 million now [laughter].
Sutart 00:28:10.342 Yeah. Yeah. In Ballarat, it's fair whack.
Jamie 00:28:13.993 So I did a stint just to see into the government sector then to see what that was like.
Sutart 00:28:18.049 Fuck.
Jamie 00:28:18.651 At the same time, that's where I was still just starting out growing a public practice, see, and man, I hated that. I didn't like that job. And that was an experience in [the self?], but all experience is good. So yeah. But started my own accounting practice. Then pretty quickly, realizes that I needed help. Once I hired staff, yeah, I was working seven days a week there. And well, as these days, my mentor, Ed Chan, brute force. Ed [used to?] call it just brute force. And that was where I was born from. That was like my dad. That was just in me that, "You want to get ahead, Jamie, you just work hard [laughter]."
Sutart 00:28:58.677 Yeah. Yeah. That's it.
Jamie 00:29:00.538 And then, I honestly ended up in a hospital just from the stress and being tired. And I ended up in a hospital and found out I had a thing called labyrinthitis, which was basically I lost my balance. So my inner ear on one side with my immune system getting down, I got a virus, and that attacks my inner ear. Yeah. Man, I was out. I was out for like four weeks, and I couldn't stand.
Sutart 00:29:23.700 Jesus.
Jamie 00:29:24.390 Yeah. It was a bit scary at the time, but it was simply from, I think, looking back now, just prolonged stress. Stress isn't good for you. A little bit's good. They make you perform well, but when it's prolonged, not good. So I really had a sort of a wake-up call then, and then I really started-- or probably, a personal or professional journey of trying to find a coach or a mentor or someone who could say, "Well, this is how you do it." Because you can use every technology in the world, but the hardest thing, Stu, was trying to manage people. It was tough like--
Sutart 00:29:58.911 Yeah.
Jamie 00:29:59.859 Manage people, find good staff, keep good staff, and then how to scale. I got to about a million dollars in turnover, have a couple of good guys, but just kept hitting that ceiling and then staff would leave. And you'd go back a bit-- like you almost [inaudible] back a bit. So I [inaudible] I had every coach I could find in Australia around, and name all the names. Yeah. And that was a whole journey itself. Yeah.
Sutart 00:30:28.368 What was the thing in the end? Was it your health, sort of the scare in a hospital, or was there a moment that you're like, "Well, hey, this is it. Fuck this. I'm out of here?"
Jamie 00:30:41.772 There was that moment. Yeah.
Sutart 00:30:43.007 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:30:44.137 Yeah, yeah. One time, I lost three staff. Two accountants and, I think, a receptionist in three months. And then I thought, "No--"
Sutart 00:30:51.900 "Fuck [laughter]. I'm done."
Jamie 00:30:54.875 Yeah. "I'm done." And I was going to ring the local-- years earlier, the firm that I worked with up in the country town where I was born, they had a small satellite office. And back in those days, it was called Bird Cameron. You might have [crosstalk].
Sutart 00:31:06.332 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:31:07.774 And I thought, "Well, I'll just ring them and see if they want to buy the clients-- the [inaudible] team." I actually thought that. As it turned out, I ended up-- thought, "No. I'll give it another go." So I rang the local university and one of the lecturers who I was sort of mates with, and I said, "Have you got any good graduates coming through?" And he said, "Yeah. I've got a person coming through." And it turns out that it was a young girl who'd just came from Sri Lanka. So she came from Sri Lanka to Australia. She'd won a scholarship--
Sutart 00:31:35.709 Oh, cool.
Jamie 00:31:35.850 --to the Fed Unit. I ended up ringing a [Rooney?]-- I had to get the time zone right, because she was in [inaudible] and still works with us to this day. Unbelievable.
Sutart 00:31:46.513 Oh, how cool.
Jamie 00:31:47.640 So [Rooney?]. This is a funny thing, right? [Rooney?] who is an accounting graduate, still trying to struggle with English a little bit, and she was my receptionist [laughter]. So I didn't care, mate. She was my receptionist, and then she became an accountant.
Sutart 00:32:04.595 Good gatekeeper for a bit. Well, and great practice for her for her English and [laughter]--
Jamie 00:32:09.259 Yeah. So I had that moment where, "No," I thought I was going to sell. I've had enough, and just lost the staff and then just kept going. And I think there was two motivators for me. One, as a kid, I always had bigger dreams of just doing something with myself or-- I think everyone certainly has dreams when they sit down and think about it. But the other motivation was just the slog and the pain that things can be better.
Sutart 00:32:35.895 Yes.
Jamie 00:32:36.793 At the time, I remember when I got [Crook?]. I just had a young family, I'd been married not that long. [inaudible] two to three years, I thought, "Well, something's has to change," because if we wanted to have more kids, [having?] it at the time and-- yeah. It was just like a dead end. All I could see was sort of a dead end, I suppose. And so motivated by both. One is the vision of trying to grow a bigger firm and do something, and the other one was just the pain. Just like, "How do I get my life under control and not be controlled by the clients?" Because you want to help people and everyone listening-- no one really ever wants to knock back a new client. It's the best thing. It's the adrenaline.
Sutart 00:33:18.570 Yeah. Yeah. No offense to the industry, but accountants aren't the greatest sellers in the world. You've got these clients that are coming to you, begging for you to do work. You're not going to say no, right? Typically?
Jamie 00:33:30.739 No. No.
Sutart 00:33:31.549 Typically. Not naturally, anyway.
Jamie 00:33:34.286 Not naturally. No. And the thing is, people need help with their tax. It's illegal not to do your tax [laughter].
Sutart 00:33:40.836 Most countries. Most countries [laughter].
Jamie 00:33:43.224 Most countries. But you really don't have to advertise. I grew like 20% year on year in the early days, because I'd simply returned phone calls and emails.
Sutart 00:33:51.724 Yeah. Anybody who did that was going to pick up the client.
Jamie 00:33:54.968 Yeah. That was the thing. So I used to just talk to people, and that's what used to happen. So they were the two motivators to try and scale-- do something better with meself in that process. So yeah.
Sutart 00:34:08.110 So you went through that moment-- I mean, not like-- I empathize, right? I think a lot of-- I don't want to generalize too much and fuck it up, but I think a lot of Aussie men of our generation, perhaps a little bit wiser, hopefully. Hard work, yes, is always more or less part of success, but there's a determination that it's like, "Well, I've come this far. I've done 80% of it." I can't look myself in the mirror and go, "I just gave up." I mean, it's just not--
Jamie 00:34:43.434 Point of no return.
Sutart 00:34:44.234 Beyond the point of no return. And it's just not in our nature to-- it's almost a matter of pride and stubbornness, perhaps, to the point where you probably could have made better decisions [laughter] along the way and got out earlier. But we find ourselves sometimes in those situations. It's like, "Well, there's no--" I've gone beyond as you said. I've gone beyond the point of no return, and I just have to keep going until I come out the other side. And I'm sure you relate, and I'm sure you would have seen that in your clients in a small town. And you'd have ag clients who are affected by climate, you'd have restaurants affected by COVID-- I mean, fuck, it's hard. It's hard going sometimes, right?
Jamie 00:35:28.444 It's really hard going, I think, until you sort of work out the formula. That was probably what it was for me. And that's, I guess, why we're sitting here talking about today, was that the biggest thing for me was mentorship. And in the end, I went through a lot of coaching companies. I even did a-- I remember at one point, I did a life coaching course just to try and work out what I wanted to do [in my career?].
Sutart 00:35:49.308 Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Jamie 00:35:50.887 And then sort of-- and honestly, also, most of it all that changed then when I met my mentor who you know well, Stu, and he's probably been on here, Ed Chan.
Sutart 00:35:58.834 Yes. No. Ed and I go way back. And I think he's early on in our podcast career [laughter].
Jamie 00:36:06.722 Yeah. That's right. So yeah, when I met Ed at a workshop, I just reached out to him after the workshop a couple of days. And sure enough, I sort of thought, "Well, this guy will never respond to my email." I think at the time he probably had 10 officers, and I think the [inaudible] group was like 20 million turnover or something and-- I emailed in, and I thought, "Oh, no, he won't respond to me [laughter]." Sure enough, two hours later, I got a response from Ed. "Yeah--"
Sutart 00:36:34.682 Here you go. Yeah?
Jamie 00:36:35.293 "--I'll consider mentoring you, Jamie. Yeah. I will need to interview you first for an hour," or whatever. And mate, from that moment, once I started listening to Ed and then applying exactly what he said, everything changed.
Sutart 00:36:49.886 It all just clicked for you, right? You just needed that glue to bring it all together or whatever metaphor you want to use [laughter].
Jamie 00:36:56.516 Yeah. Well, Ed was an accountant.
Sutart 00:36:59.436 Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. A true, true, true accountant.
Jamie 00:37:02.563 Yeah. He started his own firm from home. So he was the same as me, like probably most of us [laughter], so. And he'd scaled up. And he'd written a couple of books on it. So it was just the real deal. Ever since then, I found out what I love to do. And as they say, Stu, "You find out what you love to do, mate, you'll never work a day in your life [laughter]."
Sutart 00:37:26.137 That's it. That's it.
Jamie 00:37:27.297 So yeah. So then, that journey continued on. These days, Sky Accountants, we almost-- turnover is almost about 4 mil. We do a lot of virtual bookkeeping, accounting, tax, compliance. We have financial planning, Sky Wealth, as a division, and then Sky Finance or the mortgage broking side. So everything changed then, and I'd probably work about one day a week at Sky, [that's to see?], and then the rest of my time, or passion really, is just Wize as well. And I love landscaping. I've got some properties and stuff. So I just love the freedom that that gives you. And then not only that, helping grow Wize now and [inaudible] and then continuing to scale Sky as well. It's just as I said. I just love what I'm doing these days. I think for me, life really started at 50 years [laughter]. Only it took me 50 years to get there, but.
Sutart 00:38:26.166 That's right. You got 50 to go. You can use the first half for the [back?].
Jamie 00:38:29.182 [inaudible] so it's [inaudible] [laughter], so.
Sutart 00:38:32.084 Yeah, mate. Good. Good. Tell us about Wize Mentoring and where that's up to and who it helps and give us the spiel.
Jamie 00:38:41.149 Yeah, yeah. So what happened was after-- I think it was only supposed to be one year of mentoring with it, and then I just enjoyed it so much and such-- got good results out of it for myself, that it went on for three or four years with that mentoring pace. And then after that, I sort of felt, "Well, it's probably not much else I can learn from the guy's brain [laughter]."
Sutart 00:38:59.900 Yeah.
Jamie 00:39:00.320 Sort of like a download.
Sutart 00:39:01.741 You sucked it all out. Yeah?
Jamie 00:39:03.071 Correct. That's it. And then I think a year-- we also had a year rest or [18?] months. And then Brenton Ward, who was a friend of mine--
Sutart 00:39:10.018 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:39:11.357 --who lives in Ireland now.
Sutart 00:39:13.425 I was going to say he's in Ireland. Yeah.
Jamie 00:39:14.776 Oh, yeah, yeah. Aussie guy. I came up with the idea with Brenton. I said, "Well, how about we take everything I've learned from Ed and all my experience and Brenton's experience and get it on the Internet?" So that's what we did. So we ended up just starting with a DIY-- masterclasses are very popular these days. I looked it up. Some of the [elites?] are enormous billion-dollar industry masterclasses. So we just basically developed an [18-step?] masterclass for accounts and bookkeepers, which we call WizePulse these days, mind you. It's just fully online, and it's a series of videos you can watch, Stu, and just go through and to help you scale your firm and teach everything that I learned from Ed. And when it's on the Internet--
Sutart 00:39:54.501 Pretty broad distribution, hopefully, if you spend 10 minutes on your SEO [laughter].
Jamie 00:39:58.672 That's it. Yeah. And then what happened was we had a lot of firms in different countries reaching out to us say, "Can you do the one-on-one mentoring?" And we hadn't thought about that. So we just started to kick that off with a group coaching type arrangement and the pandemic hit. Right?
Sutart 00:40:16.806 Good timing.
Jamie 00:40:16.883 Yeah. Good timing. And then we thought, "What are we going to do now?" So then we pivoted and went to Zoom and developed the whole one-to-one mentoring so much more over the last two or three years. And then that proved to be more popular than the face-to-face stuff. So one, [inaudible] a lot forward now. We've got our own mentors as well, so they have their own firms. Part of their sort of initiation to be a mentor is to have your own firm and to go through the Wize Mentoring course and community and program. And so yeah, we offer sort of end-to-end mentoring right from that DIY, like the master class, right through to the one-to-one monthly board meetings and helping firm owners in both accounting practices and bookkeeping practices throughout the world, how to scale their firm, so. Which has just been an amazing journey because it's funny, when I look back now, for me, an Australian guy to jump on a-- to think now, I'll jump on a call with an American firm owner or in the UK or Singapore or Canada, and they've all got the same problems. That's like--
Sutart 00:41:17.566 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's some regulatory differences around the edges, but the professional services issues always remain the same, right? It's always pushing out great work, helping great people at an economical rate with a journey that you enjoy and people that you like working with to make a profit. I mean, it's as fucking easy as that, isn't it? Except it's just not [laughter].
Jamie 00:41:40.194 Yeah.
Sutart 00:41:40.760 There's a lot that goes into it.
Jamie 00:41:42.521 There's a lot that goes into it. So that's Wize Mentoring today, I think we've got about 16, 17 staff, and I think from about seven countries. There's one girl, Claudia, works from Santiago in Chile. And they've got people in New Zealand and the Philippines, India, so it's really [laughter]--
Sutart 00:41:59.012 That's good.
Jamie 00:42:00.091 Yeah. So no, it's such a really happy journey. And then, of course, the founders are [inaudible] Ed Chan, myself, and Brenton Ward. And then yeah, I think the other exciting thing we've got on the forecast there, Stu, is a new app. So we're bringing out our own Wize app application, which is essentially the core of what we teach. But it's a tool that will help any firm successfully scale, which is the really difficult side of it. And when I say scale, I mean scale sustainably. Not doing 100 hours a week. So we're sort of really looking forward to that as coming up as well.
Sutart 00:42:40.623 Oh, well, if there's anything that we can do to help, we're always here to do so. I know Sky has been a long-time supporter and contributor to Karbon content and for which we're forever grateful, obviously.
Jamie 00:42:52.925 Absolutely, mate. Yeah. So that's where we're at these days. But one of the-- probably, things to note that I think is a big issue at the moment is accounting firms everywhere trying to find talent-- trying to find staff.
Sutart 00:43:06.750 Yeah.
Jamie 00:43:07.127 So about 18 months ago, I created a division of Wize called WizeTalent. So it was probably 15 years ago, Stu, I did a course out of the US called topgrading. That's a really good story, this one. Topgrading was created by a couple of brothers, I think, but one of them was Brad Smart. And Brad Smart went and worked or helped Jack Welch at General Electric do his hiring. So out of that process-- Jack Welsh is an absolute legend in America [laughter] generally.
Sutart 00:43:36.173 Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:43:37.851 So their hiring mythology was what they call topgrading. So I really took the concepts of that hiring process and reengineered it to apply to accountants-- our industry. Accounting and bookkeeping. And so with that reengineering, we started WizeTalent. And in the last 12 months, we've done 100 hires for firms all over the world to help them find staff and recruit them. And then we built a whole system of actually how to find people in that mentoring sense. Because let's face it, man, if you're going to grow your [management?], you're going to be hiring for the [FBI?] [laughter].
Sutart 00:44:14.043 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jamie 00:44:15.360 So we did that. So that's been really exciting as well. So I've got a full-time person who is based in the Philippines and then another person here in Australia, and all they do is just work. So we'll help people find offshore staff or even local staff in their own neighborhood. That's a big problem at the moment because unemployment in Australia is at a lifetime low, I think.
Sutart 00:44:38.332 Yeah.
Jamie 00:44:38.926 And you can't get--
Sutart 00:44:40.675 It's a weird economy at the moment. Even globally, inflation and interest rates are skyrocketing, Aussie currencies are fucked, and yet, you can't find somebody to pull your coffee or work in your accounting firm or mow your lawn. The job market is so tight that there's so little flexibility in the economy.
Jamie 00:45:04.733 You're right. And it's one of those times where you really have to improvise. If you want to sort of stay ahead of the curve, you really have to improvise and adapt. And my last hire was just from Sri Lanka. Going back 10, 15 years ago, we lost [touch so much?] already. But come full circle, yeah, [inaudible]. If you watch the news, Sri Lanka's collapsed.
Sutart 00:45:23.284 Yes.
Jamie 00:45:23.803 [inaudible] collapse. So there's people out there.
Sutart 00:45:27.999 You do have to be flexible in the way that you structure your organizations and--
Jamie 00:45:32.341 This last person I found, Stu, was on Upwork [laughter], so.
Sutart 00:45:34.571 Yeah, yeah. No. I get it. I get it. I mean, as much as you want to be mindful and supportive of the local economy, and whether that be Ballarat or [Reno here?] or-- I mean, Incline Village, we can barely keep a-- I mean, this story is not uncommon. We can barely keep a restaurant open here. You feel like you've got to eat out as a local three nights a week just to keep the local economy ticking over. It's really--
Jamie 00:46:03.584 Yeah. Well, the hard thing is you can't even find stuff in Australia.
Sutart 00:46:06.939 That's right. That's the same here.
Jamie 00:46:07.710 Everyone's got a job. Everyone's got a job.
Sutart 00:46:09.852 Same here. And then people are leaving for like 10 and 20 grand pay rises. It's going to look pretty shit on their LinkedIn in 10 years time, but they'll just job hop and move around because it's fucking easy, right? Like, "Oh."
Jamie 00:46:23.979 Yeah.
Sutart 00:46:24.905 So not always for a greater challenge or better lifestyle or better. In a weird way, it's a really employee's market still and in particular geographies especially.
Jamie 00:46:38.908 I've had discussions with-- we work with LinkedIn Recruiter as part of WizeTalent, and we had a chat that our new-- the branch in the UK, and it's the same way. And then discussions in-- it's the same. It tends to be everywhere they have this problem. That's sort of something now-- I suppose it's a problem, and you just have to try and overcome it, so.
Sutart 00:47:01.133 Well, Jamie Johns. Hey, mate. I was looking forward to this all week. Thank you so much for coming on the Accounting Leaders Podcast. Let's do it again, and let's not leave it so long between drinks, hey?
Jamie 00:47:14.004 Yeah. Hopefully, we can come out and see you there too, mate. We had that on the plans before the pandemic hit, so.
Sutart 00:47:19.148 Yeah. Let's get it back on the drawing board. Come for a ski and where you can put the real cold weather to good use [laughter].
Jamie 00:47:25.462 That's right.
Sutart 00:47:26.969 Jamie Johns, you're a legend.
Jamie 00:47:28.468 No worries, mate. Catch you later, mate. Bye.
Sutart 00:47:30.486 Bye-bye. [music] Thanks for listening to this episode. If you've found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm in Karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there including guides, articles, templates, webinars, and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. [music] I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you like this session. We'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining, and see you in the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.